Often when I practice the organ I’m immersed in the immediacy of each successive moment of music-making. Act and sound conjoin in the uninterrupted present. The best concert performances remain in that heightened state, but a quotidian playing session can too.
Other times, the mind wanders, the body playing as if on autopilot. Seemingly random memories return. They can be both connected to, and disconnected from, the music being practiced or the place it is being played in.
Drivers can experience something similar, finding themselves twenty miles down the road with no recollection of having piloted the car safely through tricky highway traffic, while their reverie has travelled much greater distances.
I started to play the organ as a teenager, having discovered with help of a family friend that J. S. Bach composed a lot more music for the King of Instruments than just the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. (Unbeknownst to me, precisely at the time—1979—scholarly doubts were being raised about Bach’s authorship of that most famous of organ works.) As a young pianist, I had already immersed myself in Bach’s keyboard music without pedal parts, but when that family friend bought me LPs of Bach’s complete organ works recorded in the late 1940s and early 50s by the blind German organist Helmut Walcha on historic German instruments that had escaped the destruction of World War II, I quickly realized the extent of the explorations I was about to embark on.
The next summer, I began studying the organ in Washington, DC, learning Bach works both small (Orgelbüchlein chorale preludes) and large (the Preludes and Fugues in A Minor and in G Major) in two months. I took quickly to the feet, spurred by the brilliant challenge of Bachian four-limbed performance.
When I returned to my family home on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound off of Seattle, I needed a place to practice. My mother took me first to the Catholic church to inquire about being allowed access to their organ. The request was rejected decisively right there in the church office.
We drove a mile down High School Road, the Olympic Mountains rising in front of us to the west, to the Lutheran church. We were told that their organ was too fine an instrument for a kid. My mother informed the pastor that I could play Bach, the greatest Lutheran composer. The response was the same: I wouldn’t touch their prized organ.
We headed south a half mile away to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. They were happy to see me and immediately allowed me to play the organ, enthusiastically granting unlimited practice time before or after school. The church was perched in a grove of Douglass Firs above Eagle Harbor, the long, snaking bay that opens up around its bend directly towards Seattle.
The St. Barnabas rector was a big-bellied man with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, a cherubic face whose jowls jostled around his white starched wrap-around dog collar. Father Tom was much loved by his parishioners. He drove a big Mercedes, had five adopted children, and a stern, statuesque wife a head taller than him.
The St. Barnabas organ was terrible. The company that manufactured the instrument made 11,000 instruments over more than a century before it folded in 1992. The sounds of the handful of stops were sharp-edged, industrial. I didn’t really know that it was bad at the beginning, lacking as I was in experience with quality instruments. The St. Barnabas organ was a reliable exercise station for learning to play this most physically involving of musical instruments.
I became the assistant to the church organist, Corinne Berg, who did her best with the organ. She had experience with European originals and was well-informed about the performance practice of historic repertories. She took me to concerts on the growing number of bespoke, baroque-style organs in the Seattle area, then becoming one of the leading organ centers in America, even the world. I began playing for the early Sunday service and helping with the later one as well.
I often got up three hours before school to practice, dropped off at the church by my father on his way to the 5:35am ferry that took him to his job in Seattle.
In the foggy mornings before sunrise the bare concrete floor and masonry of the brick walls smelled damp, like a basement, like a place where things were stored, or hidden. In the springtime, the dawn light filtered through the stained glass of the arched windows at the east end of the little church. The organ console was set down into the concrete floor a couple of feet so that the organist’s head was below the nearby choir pews. This arrangement hid the organist from anyone out in the length of church. On those mornings I was alone in the place, never disturbed by a single soul.
In the afternoons Father Tom would be in his office beyond the vestry directly attached to the church. When he heard the organ playing, he always came in for a visit, hoisting his body down into the pit and onto the organ bench beside me. He would put his arm around my shoulders and soon start into a back massage. The same hand would then return to his side before finding its way to my knee, then my thigh. My right hand had already taken up position a barrier against the further advance of his left up my leg.
On Sundays there would be lewd jokes and slaps on the backside on the way into the vestry. Sometimes, between the two services, Father Tom would host a quick breakfast at a diner in the nearby town of Winslow where he’d be sure to slide into the booth right next to me before any other parishioners could take that spot.
Over the next few years there were other closer calls with this priest and pillar of the community at concerts and youth group retreats. Unlike many Bainbridge boys over many years, I resisted his invitations to tour Europe with him. When I was a senior in high school, the charges of abuse on those trips came out. A group of St. Barnabas parents took their allegations to the Bishop of Olympia, Robert Cochrane. The Right Reverend, a pulled up to the meeting at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle in his Cadillac convertible sporting the vanity plates BISHOP1. The Right Reverend stonewalled on the accusations. Father Tom left St. Barnabas for a job as headmaster at an Episcopal boys’ school in California.
This summer I’ve been back on Bainbridge Island for several weeks. Once again, I needed a place to practice the organ and St. Barnabas welcomed me.
The concrete floor has been covered by tasteful tiles. The interior smells fresh. The old organ has been replaced by a new, larger one that spreads itself grandly around the stained-glass windows rising above the altar. The console is just behind the altar in plain view.
I’ve been practicing there, less than a mile down the road from where my mother now lives.
I played Bach in preparation for a concert east of the Cascades in Yakima. I began my first session at St. Barnabas with the mighty Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major. The unapologetically pompous opening, with its haughty dotted rhythms and nonchalantly lingering dissonances, unexpectedly makes way for a dialogue of puckish echoes that are brusquely waved away by an extended discourse in austere counterpoint—the first of three riveting polyphonic sections meticulously built into the elaborate, symbolic architecture of the piece. A fugue has broken out—prematurely in the prelude, the wrong place for it. Bach does not feel bound by the decorous dictates of genre.
My limbs pursue his fugal machinations as if driven by some external force. The music is playing itself.
The vestry door opens and the round, tanned face of Father Tom above the priestly white collar and black shirt shines into the dim afternoon light. I see him approach over the top of my music. His lips are moist, his brown eyes bright, his soft, shiny hands busy out the sleeves of his tweed blazer. He’s beaming as he walks towards me. I have time for just a few more bars.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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